Posts: 10

Topic: The Principle of your System

Blog wrote:

The idea of the Perpetuum infrastructure has been engineered to be robust from pretty much Day 1, although admittedly we kept expanding on several things over time. The concept was the following: Since we're a very very small group of developers, we cannot afford turnaround time and taking time away from each other when it comes to fixing things, so the optimal solution is to allow anyone to fix anything they can. Of course, this doesn't mean that people with no interest in coding can happily add mov ax, 1 into random places into our source tree, but it's important to realize that in a project like Perpetuum (which is a rather strongly data-driven game), we have several times more the data than we have actual code. This means that as long as the artists and content folks can change the data, programmers can work independently of them, so essentially what it boils down to is exposing as much data as we can. (If you started giggling, do a few push-ups. It helps.)

The RED part doesnt involve Translators and translations.

Theres one MAJOR aspect thats rather anoying, I try to explain with an example:

DEV Alf (The balancing guy) changes a module from "Unique" to "non Unique" - he can do this with two clicks AFAIK

DEV Quodys (The Text guy)then has to change the Item description of that module for ALL Tiers individually (from T0 - T4+, and all prototypes)

Up to 18 Translatorseach one of them HAS to notice that change and search manually for the entries that got changed if they do not log in on daily basis.

Things that happened or can happen:

Alf forgot to notify Quodys about that change, or it happend 5min before patch

Quodys forgot to flag the changed entries after he modified them.

voluntary Translator quit, the entry never changed since noone else understands that language

An the only thing that is wrong here? The information, that an item is "Unique" "Mission Ammo" "Niani" "Elite" "prototype" "T0" "cannot be recycled" is written into the same textbox as the item description that would be exactly the SAME for all items A T0 has the same text as a T4

For those who are still reading:recently the Mission ammo got changed from "can only be aquired as mission reward" to "can only be bought form syndicate shop" -> thats one sentence try to count how many entries have to be changed.

Re: The Principle of your System

The RED part doesnt involve Translators and translations.

That's just wrong in every level. The blog post (in a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CONTEXT, but let's roll with it) says that exposing data instead of burying it in code allows people working with the content to change the final result without having to touch the code. This is exactly how the translations work. Are the descriptions redundant? Yes. Does that redundancy however allow a huge degree of freedom for the descriptions? Yes. (Maintainability is an entirely different question and I'll get to that.)

recently the Mission ammo got changed from "can only be aquired as mission reward" to "can only be bought form syndicate shop" -> thats one sentence try to count how many entries have to be changed.

The problem here is that you managed to pick an example that cannot be procedurally generated because the client isn't aware of where a certain item can be acquired from (obviously). But it can be worked around. The problem is that only a certain degree of maintainability can be gained by "composite" descriptions because even the flavor-text can contain outdated data after a while, although I suppose that's less of a problem.

"Composite" descriptions, however, cannot and SHOULD not be done on a sub-sentence level. That doesn't make any linguistic sense.

Re: The Principle of your System

Whats with translations? Seems noone cares at all about them. faction ammo change was a lots of time ago but we still have "Volcano" instead of "Apocalypse" in russian translation, etc. And thats only fresh example! I've even switched client to enghlish language to at least understand what do some extensions exactly do etc. If there is any problem with translators, let players know - alots of us can volunteer that with ease.

Re: The Principle of your System

What about an external SQL tool that can update fields in bulk then?

This isn't meant as a WTF you don't know how to code, but sometimes seeing something 1 way for years presents an assumption that it has to be that way. And/or there's so many other things to do the thought of adding another non-critical change just gets lost in the madness.